ESA Science & Technology - Hipparcos
Fact Sheet
Unique to Europe was the very first space mission for measuring the positions, distances, motions, brightness and colours of stars - for astrometry, as the experts call it. ESA's Hipparcos satellite pinpointed more than 100 000 stars, 200 times more accurately than ever before. As astrometry has been the bedrock of the study of the Universe since ancient times, this leap forward has affected every branch of astronomy. The primary product from this pioneering and successful mission was a set of stellar catalogues, The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues, published by ESA in 1997.
News
News
Another Dimension: 3D visualisation redefines Milky Way's local architecture
16 November 2015Astronomers have used modern techniques to visualise data from ESA's Hipparcos space astrometry mission in three dimensions.
Michael Perryman awarded prestigious Tycho Brahe Prize
6 June 2011Professor Michael Perryman, the scientific leader of ESA's Hipparcos mission, and a founding father of its successor mission, Gaia, has been awarded the 2011 Tycho Brahe Prize from the European Astronomical Society.
Special Features
Special Features
Science@ESA: Episode 6: Charting the Galaxy - from Hipparcos to Gaia
15 October 2009In this sixth episode of the Science@ESA vodcast series Rebecca Barnes discovers the motions of the stars, learns how astronomers measure their distances and looks at the new European mission that will really get to grips with our place in the Universe.
Query the Hipparcos & Tycho Catalogues
12 February 2004Several research tools have been developed to facilitate access to data from the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues, and the Tycho-2 catalogue.
Hipparcos Star Globe
2 October 2007The Hipparcos Star Globe depicts the celestial sphere that was astrometrically viewed as a whole for the first time by the Hipparcos satellite. It is a projection of the night sky onto an icosahedron (a polyhedron with 20 triangle faces), highlighting especially bright stars and the constellations. Printed onto two sheets of A4 paper, the globe...
